• Elizabeth Restaurant
  • Aaron Martinez, the new chef de cuisine at Elizabeth

From its foraging-based approach to cuisine to the owls that decorate its nooks and crannies, few restaurants have reflected their chef-owner’s personality and outlook more completely than Iliana Regan’s Michelin-starred Elizabeth in Lincoln Square. Named after Regan’s late sister, the restaurant is intended to be like a tea party in the woods (as Regan told the Reader before the opening). The announcement that she’s kicking herself upstairs and appointing a chef de cuisine with a considerable degree of authority over her restaurant is a bit surprising. But as she explains the decision to put San Francisco chef Aaron Martinez in charge of Elizabeth, it makes sense why she responded to his sensibility—and she hopes that Elizabeth will only get better as she moves to oversee both it and her new bakery, Bunny, and its pop-up space, Wunder POP, in Lakeview.

Iliana Regan: Yeah, I might have a little ADD! Since all of that’s going to be happening and it’s a big project and it’s like Elizabeth where I run the entire place, I’m going to be taking that aspect over at these restaurants, too, where I do the social media and pay our sales taxes and payroll and everything else. And essentially having to be an executive chef at a new place all over again. So for the first time I’m hiring a chef de cuisine.

So I’m really excited about that, and he’s going to start implementing the Game of Thrones menu right away. He’s not as big of a fan [of the show] as I am, but I have the menu written and he will work on developing some of the recipes and implementing some of the aesthetics.

California, needless to say, has a very different climate and idea of what’s local and when than the midwest. How will you adapt to the seasons here?

One of the things I’ve thought about is, how do people who are restaurateurs, how does somebody like Paul Kahan create so many restaurants and yet they all feel like you’re at Paul Kahan’s restaurant? Because you know at Dove’s Luncheonette that he’s not back there cooking the food, or Big Star, and yet when I’m there I feel like I’m at his restaurant. So that’s the goal, and when I ran across Aaron I thought that when people come into Elizabeth and have his food, or his food and my food combined, they’re going to still feel like they’re at Iliana Regan’s restaurant.

He’s also really excited to learn about some of the gathered items here, which he had some experience doing in In de Wulf. So I think my personality will still come through in the ingredients that I gather, and I bring them to him and we say, what can we do with it to really make it shine? I think that’s the other fun part.